Ordinary lives put under a microscope

Near the end of the astonishing film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” a woman makes a meat loaf. Standing at a table in her kitchen, Jeanne Dielman cracks open an egg onto a lump of ground beef, sprinkles in some flour and begins kneading. There’s no music playing in the kitchen, no talk radio, no sounds of children playing, no sense of life filling the emptiness -- just the squish, squish, squish of meat squeezing through Jeanne’s fingers. Rarely has flesh looked so repellent and sounded so obscene.

Chantal Akerman directed “Jeanne Dielman” in 1975 when she was 25, the same age as Orson Welles was when he began shooting “Citizen Kane.” Like the Welles film, “Jeanne Dielman” is about a specific person in a specific world, and like “Kane” the film says a great deal about the person who made it. Both are also masterpieces, but “Jeanne Dielman” is a more “difficult” enterprise than “Citizen Kane;” certainly at 3 hours and 20 minutes it is less easy to love. Still, its premise is high-concept enough for Hollywood: A middle-class widow supports herself and her son by turning tricks. Each day Jeanne prepares the family meals, polishes her son’s shoes and lays a small towel on her bed in anticipation of her clients. Then something happens -- something shocking, unsurprising, cataclysmic.

The standard line on “Jeanne Dielman” -- which is screening as part of the Akerman retrospective presented by REDCAT and the UCLA Film and Television Archive -- is that it’s a feminist classic, a designation that’s both perfectly true and reductive. Although Jeanne works hard, she prostitutes herself because sex is the only thing of value that a woman like her has to offer to the world. Brilliantly played by the late Delphine Seyrig with immaculate hair and a frozen smile, Jeanne slips through crowds like a specter. Said Akerman of her second feature, “I do think it’s a feminist film because I give space to things which were never, almost never, shown in that way, like the daily gestures of a woman. They are the lowest in the hierarchy of film images.”

Akerman’s unblinking, obstinate attention on these daily gestures of this woman -- Jeanne breads some veal cutlets in real time too, as well as shops and cleans -- gives the film a bloodless ethnographic quality. In his review, the late New York Times critic Vincent Canby nailed the movie and its director’s pitiless style perfectly when he wrote, “Miss Akerman records three crucial days in the life of Jeanne Dielman (Miss Seyrig) as if she were observing the habits of some previously unknown insect.” Jeanne is one of those invisible mothers and housewives whose unpaid labor keeps the world comfortably rotating, but she is also a close relation to such class casualties as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Herr R, an ordinary man who one day pops open his eyes and runs furiously amok.

“I am Belgian, a Polish Jew by origin. I was born in Brussels 6 June 1950 and I wanted to make films very young, after I saw ‘Pierrot le fou’ by Godard.” This is how Akerman once described herself and although this portrait seems uncharacteristically pithy for a filmmaker who favors long uninterrupted takes and camera movements, it does shed light on her origins. For 36 years, working in Belgium, the United States and mostly France, Akerman has shot more than 30 feature-length and short visual works in various film and video formats. She has made films, including documentaries, under the influence of American avant-garde cinema and a few movies that bridge the legacies of the French and Hollywood musical. Hinged on questions of desire and identity, her work is sui generis, occasionally exasperating and sometimes sublime.

She made her first film, a charmingly awkward 13-minute short called “Blow Up My Town,” in 1968, when she was 18. Shot in black and white without sync sound and deeply under the sway of Jean-Luc Godard (like her early inspiration, Akerman even reads the credits aloud), the film pivots on a young woman, played by the director, mucking about in a kitchen with degrees of slapstick silliness and unease. There’s no story per se though much happens. Like some later Akerman films, including “Jeanne Dielman” and 1983’s “The Man With the Suitcase,” the short presents a body in relation to a specific -- often gender-specific -- time and space. Inside their kitchens, their bedrooms and maze-like apartments, Akerman’s women reverse the coordinates of classic narrative -- they have their “adventures” at home.

Akerman’s characters do get out of the house. Indeed, during the late 1980s the director shot one of her greatest films, “American Stories/Food, Family and Philosophy,” completely alfresco on the then-ragged fringes of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A patchwork of short vignettes, the film is a poignant, often wildly funny exploration of Jewish identity. It opens at night with a sweeping view of lower Manhattan, including a heartbreaking glimpse of the twin towers, under a shroud of mist. In voice-over, Akerman confesses that “my own story is full of missing links, blanks, and I do not even have a child.” It’s a characteristically naked moment from this daughter of Holocaust survivors, and a moving overture for a film that through allegories, testimonials and some seriously old-school Borscht Belt waggery addresses the struggle for modern Jewish survival.

“American Stories” is one of Akerman’s most pleasurable films and one of her most generous of spirit. This is heresy, but I find that the director’s aesthetic rigor can periodically make her work tough going and I say this as someone who once watched (twice) a half-hour film consisting of close-ups of sand granules. Critics including Jim Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum have written beautifully about such slow-moving Akerman films as “From the East” (1993) and “From the Other Side” (2002), which along with “South” (1999) form a trilogy of documentaries set in specific geographic locations. But as much as I respect Akerman’s intentions, her desire that we see beyond the surface of things -- “From the Other Side” is a politically provocative exploration of the border between Mexico and the U.S. -- I find these particular films didactic and punishingly dull.

That said, Akerman is one of the most gifted, authentically original filmmakers working today, and “Jeanne Dielman” remains one of the great films of the past few decades. This retrospective affords a rare opportunity to gauge the range and depth of her work, to take an extended walk on cinema’s more adventurous side. Other highlights: the director’s coming of sexual-identity film “I...You...He...She” (1974); “All Night Long” (1982) and “Night and Day” (1991), both covert musicals; and the autobiographical “Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman” (1996). Whatever you do, though, don’t miss “Portrait of a Young Girl From the Late Sixties in Brussels” (1993). A tender portrait of the artist as a young mess, the film is a tip of the hat to the French New Wave through a specifically female point of view and is an absolute joy from start to finish.